What made Ubuntu so popular? [closed]

Question

I am a long time Debian user and I have no direct experience on Ubuntu, but I see it's now popular as no other distribution has ever been. What characteristics made it so popular?

I'm looking for the reasons that made it that much more popular than other distributions.

Answer 1

The easiness Ubuntu focuses on probably is a reason too but there are many linux distris that are very easy to use nowadays. I think the difference to those other "easy" distros is the Ubuntu's PR.

Ubuntu got a lot of media attention and they used it in a very professional way. Ubuntu also has a very nice homepage that focuses on presenting their product rather than technical details. This may seem a bad reason to select an Operating System for most of us but the normal non-enthusiast user looks for these kind of things.

Answer 2

It's free, easy to install and setup, light weight, etc.

I would say a large part of it is due to the wide variety of built in features, and low system requirements. It's a great easy to install operating system to put on older machines as they are re-purposed for other uses.

Due to the popularity of Ubuntu, it also has a very large support community. Help can be found on multiple forums and IRC channels.

Answer 3

What made Ubuntu different was that at the time it was initially released no one else was focusing on desktop integration. Upstream has gotten better at this in the last five years, as have (to a certain extent) other distributions, but never forget that it was Ubuntu that pioneered the effort. Much like the early KDE days when the attitude was "Of course Linux can be configured to do that," but the reality was that it was difficult or impossible, Ubuntu took practical and user-visible problems and addressed them at a distribution level.

It wasn't good enough that it be possible to configure your hardware to work, for Ubuntu people it had to be entirely automatic. It wasn't enough that something could be installed, it had to be installed by default or, at least, come with default settings tuned as if it were part of the base install.

Ubuntu's focus on integration--the whole experience from start to finish--and not just checking off the "Do we have package $foo?" checkbox made it different and, to a certain extent, still makes it different.

I am a long time Debian user and a Debian fan. I don't like a lot of things Ubuntu does and a lot of ways that it works, but the Desktop Linux effort will long be in Ubuntu's debt for showing us that a distribution isn't simply upstream pre-compiled and that there's a lot of work (sometimes little things) that can be done to produce an experience that 'feels' better.

Windows converts and random end users may not be able to express what it is that made Ubuntu more appealing--they'll just say it seemed easy to use, or friendly--and that's kind of the point: it's not a specific feature, necessarily, it's the whole attitude of the distribution that makes it work.

Answer 4

There are many reasons why Ubuntu took off, and the responses posted are very insightful. I don't know if I can add much, but here's why I adopted it:

• Consistent release schedule: I can't tell you how excited I get knowing a new version is coming up in a few short months. Their adoption of Debian as the underlying system was, in my mind, a great idea. Users get all the benefit of a rock-solid distro (with one of the best package managers available) without waiting for extensive lengths of time for new releases.
• Gnome/KDE: Though I prefer Openbox and Enlightenment, I don't think it's fair to forget the evolution both of these WMs have undergone. If Ubuntu had gone with a different WM, they wouldn't have been as successful. Yes, other less-successful distros are packaged w/either (or both) of these WMs, but this is beside the point. If Ubuntu had gone in a different direction, this discussion wouldn't have happened.
• Documentation: I've had great success with my system, relying on the documentation I find on Ubuntu's site. After working with a few other distros (Fedora, Gentoo, SuSE), I've had the best experience with Ubuntu's documentation.
• Look and Feel: Ubuntu's branding and theme is very professional. I've had devout Windows-users look over my shoulder at work and comment on the attractiveness of my system. And this is just the basic look & feel.
• Installation: though it's possible other distros broke the original ground, Ubuntu was the first distro I used which handled most of the pain I experienced with installation. It provides an easy disk-partitioning system and installation manager, which I've never (since I first adopted it in 2006) had serious issues with.
• Hardware compatibility: Having worked with other distros, struggling and fighting to get sound, wireless, and video working, Ubuntu is just amazing. Though I've had issues with the install on my Mac (kernel updates break its compatibility with my wireless, dangit!), my PC and previous laptop (Toshiba Satelite) never had a single issue with hardware. Sound always worked, and my wireless was rock solid. I've been able to get video working such that Fallout 3 (and other games) work beautifully in Wine. I've not seen such stability in other distros.
• Focus: I think Ubuntu has one of the best perspectives for a Linux distro. They seem to consistently focus on end-users, dropping the traditional elitism of the Linux community. This was most apparent to me when they announced they wouldn't bundle GIMP in 4.10. Though I really like GIMP, it's confusing and awkward for users which simply want to do basic image editing. Decisions like this seem to be made because of the end-user, not because it will be popular with the Linux community. And this is coming from an arrogant Linux elitist :)
• Underlying Accessibility: Though I can't think of a distro which doesn't do this, Ubuntu allows me access to the underlying system. Even with their focus on abstracting the more complex side of Linux, I can still do what I need to with the system itself. I'm not prevented from handling whatever I want, however I want.

Answer 5

Note that Ubuntu uses Debian's package manager as well as their packaging structure (configuring Apache is the same, etc). It's not that much different than Debian.

I think the biggest difference between Ubuntu and Debian is that Ubuntu have a team that is dedicated (i.e. paid) to integrate everything together into one look and feel and to test the distro to make it all works together very, very well. This does not take away from Debian's community structure (which is fantastic) but Debian has a lot of people making decisions whereas Ubuntu has a few people make decisions with a lot of people to make sure that it happens.

Answer 6

I would say one thing that makes it popular with regular users and those migrating from windows is the ease of initial install. I have noted that some people who are serious linux users don't like that as it 'isn't as customizable', however I disagree with them. The big thing for most people is you pop in the disk, with a few unintimidating questions you are up and running and the standard packages installed cover a large majority of usage situations. I think a big barrier the linux community faced was the difficulty of the initial install and configuration. That is very difficult for people who are not use to configuring systems or things like that, so really Ubuntu reduces the barrier to entry into the linux community, but still retains the rich and powerful Debian base making it usable by the linux guru as well for their desktop or laptop.

Answer 7

It just works in a way that other distributions, and at times even Windows after driver installation, do not. In particular, the "everything is free" distributions tend to require a lot of command line configuration to get wi-fi or graphics drivers working acceptably. Also, for some reason, a lot of Linux distributions won't work on one of my monitors because they go out of range. Only Ubuntu and Windows work straight away there.

As well, Ubuntu is aimed at being Linux for the masses - easy to use, all that command line hidden away from you unless you specifically go looking for it. This means a lot of people automatically reccomend it to Linux newbies, even if their distribution of choice is something else.

Answer 8

The Ubuntu installation CD can be used as a LiveCD. This means people could try it before installing it. I think this allayed a lot of fear people may have had, and allowed them to try before spending hours installing.

Answer 9

I love ubuntu's out-of-the box fonts. For me and 3 other people this was a reason to install ubuntu as a second OS. Now it is the primary one.

Answer 10

To be clear, I'm primarily a Windows user who has been tinkering with various Linux distros over the years. Take that for what you will. That said...

Ubuntu seems to consistently be the simplest to install and easiest to start using. In some ways it is similar to Windows, so that is a factor for people who are used to Windows.

EDIT: I'll add some point form impressions.

• Ease of installation
• Regular release schedule
• Just one window manager (Gnome) - some distros offer KDE, some offer both.
• Wide package selection - admittedly not limited to Ubuntu, but this distro is well-connected
• Well marketed

Answer 11

I use Debian at work and mostly use Ubuntu at home. Honestly, there's not a whole lot of difference from a general user's point of view... Ubuntu has a gui interface to apt, but I mostly just use apt-get from the command line. Ubuntu is much more polished, has better PR, and releases twice a year... by and large it takes the best parts of Debian, and makes them more user friendly.

I have had both wonderful and terrible install experiences with Ubuntu. In the places that it works, it works flawlessly... but god help you if you have a wireless card that isn't well supported *chough*broadcom*cough*. I'm using Ubuntu largely because the painful install was the second install that I did... I had heard a few people talking about hard installs, and I had no idea what they were talking about...

Answer 12

Uncompromising ease of use on install, and an update engine that works out of the box.

Answer 13

Free CDs. First dose is for free, you know :)

Answer 14

I think the answer to why Ubuntu is so popular is that it is super easy and quick to install, it is very quick, it is stable, great user community, and lots of hardware support (I have never had a problem installing it on any hardware) and it is free. There is no downside except there is some SW that doesn't work under WINE but there is usually a Linux compatible program and did I mention that it is all free!

Here is my history:

I have tried Ubuntu on and off since 8.04 and always went back to XP but since 10.10, I completely switched to Ubuntu and will never go back to Windows. Ubuntu is so quick and stable that I would never go back especially after a Vista laptop experience I bought for my wife. Vista was so painfully slow and unstable I was shocked even on high end hardware, I spent a bunch of money upgrading the RAM and then spent a bunch of money upgrading to Windows 7, what a horrible experience that was. I had to reinstall over and over for it to kinda work OK but was still slow and unstable.

I finally bought her a Mac and both of us were so happy, no more maintenance, no more virus, no more spare, no more crashes, no more problems. I UPGRADED her old laptop to Ubuntu and now it works like a it is running on an OS designed by God himself. It boots up so quick and it is so stable and all programs are free and I never have to pay those greedy idiots in Redmond another cent ever. The most amazing thing was that I actually installed Ubuntu on a very old PC (about 8 years old, Pentium 4 with 1 gig of RAM and 40 GIG HDD) and it ran faster than a Quad core PC with XP.